Many attempts have been made to devise a high throughput production system for detecting defects in elongated articles such as food products, including, but not limited to, raw potato strips and the like and for removing identified defects as the articles are being processed. Many systems have been constructed for optically inspecting articles and for separating the articles based upon whether or not the optical information indicates that the article contains a defect. Frequently the size of the defect may be quite small and the remainder of the article may be quite satisfactory. Unfortunately, processing the article to remove only the identified defect requires additional equipment and additional handling which increases the costs of processing and slows the processing speed.
Attempts have been made to process articles such as sliced potatoes utilized for “french fries” in which the articles are aligned in spaced lanes with a major axis generally parallel to a path of travel and pass beneath individual lane image capturing devices such as, but not limited to, cameras and scanners, for inspecting the french fries for defects. If defects are identified, one or more knives on a rotating wheel is projected from the wheel to cut the identified defect from the identified article. One such device is illustrated in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,543,030 and 3,664,337 granted to Raye, et al. on Nov. 24, 1970 and May 23, 1972, respectively. However, because of limitations inherent in the equipment, it is difficult to process large volumes utilizing the equipment illustrated in such patents. One important limitation is the difficulty of positioning and processing the potato strips in very close proximity to each other and for moving the articles past the electrical optical inspection station and the wheel cutting station at high speeds.
Along a similar line, U.S. Pat. No. 4,656,904 granted Sep. 19, 1978 to K. Vomfett, describes an apparatus for moving raw potato sticks past sensing equipment for determining whether the sticks have defects, and then past a cutting system having a pair of vertically moveable cutters that move down through slots defined in a trough conveyor for cutting out the defect. The defective segment is removed below the trough. Such a system is quite slow and incapable of handling high volume production. As the knife blades pass down through the product, the product remains substantially stationary and cannot regain its forward movement until the knives are retracted.
The use of cutting knives, whether the knives are ejected using centrifugal force from a spinning wheel, or moved by any other means has occasionally been problematic in high throughput operations, especially in the food industry. Further, the repeated extension and retraction of such knives has led to mechanical wear, and occasional “sticking” of the knives in one position, or the other, which can stop the throughput process, allows defective materials to pass therethrough; or further can result in the damage or complete destruction of the knife.
One possible advancement in high throughput food processing operations has been the utilization of water jet cutters which have tended to resolve the earlier mentioned issue of “sticking” cutting blades and also allowed for more rapid processing of food products.
For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,623,868 to McKenna, issued Apr. 29, 1997 and discloses a carrot processing machine that uses a high pressure water jet cutter to cut off the tops and tails of carrots and which also segments the carrots into shorter lengths while the carrots are disposed within a series of pockets defined in a conveyor. Another prior art example is U.S. Pat. No. 8,549,996 to Pryor, et al. issued Oct. 8, 2013, and that uses a high pressure water jet cutter to “top” and “tail” lettuce heads, as the heads of lettuce are disposed on a feed conveyor. A still further prior art example is U.S. 2014/0272055 to Yang, et al., published Sep. 18, 2014, and which discloses an automated fruit and vegetable calyx or stem removal machine that uses a high pressure water jet cutter to remove the calyx of strawberries that are oriented on a conveyor belt.
One universal characteristic of the known methods for high-throughput processing of food products is that the individual pieces of product are supported from below during the cutting process so that the knives, or high pressure stream of water may sever the pieces as desired, and the support, under the piece or object being severed, provides positional stability during the severing process. Providing a support of the individual item to be severed, during the severing process is a limiting factor in the processing of these products or objects, because the amount of space (side-to-side and end-to-end) is limited by the conveyor size, and also by the conveyor speed. Further, the support of the items or objects upon a conveyor makes it impossible to optically inspect the individual items from all sides, such that defects that are positioned immediately adjacent to the underlying and supporting conveyor cannot be imaged for sorting purposes. The inability to image all sides and surfaces of the individual items is a limitation that allows defective products to pass through the inspection process.
The invention herein is an improvement over known inspection, sorting and cutting apparatus by providing an invention that releases the individual items into a predicted unsupported trajectory; that inspects individual items from all sides and surfaces during the predicted unsupported trajectory; and further that cuts/severs identified individual items by making one or more simultaneous cuts per item, to remove identified defects therein during the predicted, unsupported trajectory of the individual pieces; and by using a high pressure liquid to make the cuts.
One of the principal objects of the instant invention is to provide a high volume, accurate inspection and cutting device for detecting color or shape variance defects in the articles such as potato sticks or potato strips, and then removing the defects while the sticks or articles are moving in a predicted unsupported trajectory. A still further object of this invention is to provide a high volume inspection and cutting apparatus for removing defects from articles with equipment that is quite inexpensive relative to its processing capacity.
These and other objects and advantages of this invention will become apparent upon reading the following detailed description of a preferred embodiment.